[greggman]

I agree with you. And like FB they can just show the top few lines and you can click to read more.

I don't agree with the other comments that 140 is some magic number. I also don't agree that forcing people to shorten their message is a good thing or adds anything. Lots of things can't be shortened to 140 characters. Lots of people post 3-9-12 tweets in a row to try to make their point or post pictures of text or whatever to get around the limit. If you knew you could write as much as you want but only the top 140 characters would appear "above the line" people would still try to give you enough info in that first 140 characters for you to decide if you want to click "more..."

[niftich]

There are many other sites that let people post long-form content and even offer social-like features to go with it.

Bite-sized tweets are a 'feature' for the company itself, because ideally, they can be surfaced out-of-context (like on an algorithmicially jumbled timeline or some aggregator page), and can be seamlessly intermixed with promoted content.

When it was brand-new, Twitter was unique and had a differentiating format. Today, Instagram is the closest analogue except the image and caption are flipped for maximum visual appeal, and that format has seriously infringed on the marketshare (and use-cases) of Twitter by attracting a certain type of content-producer; one that appeals to the coveted 18-30 crowd.